The Tao of Travel

Preface:The Importance of ElsewhereAs a child, yearning to leave home and go far away, the image in mymind was of flight — my little self hurrying off alone. The word “travel”did not occur to me, nor did the word “transformation,” which was myunspoken but enduring wish. I wanted to find a new self in a distantplace, and new things to care about. The importance of elsewhere wassomething I took on faith. Elsewhere was the place I wanted to be. Tooyoung to go, I read about elsewheres, fantasizing about my freedom.Books were my road. And then, when I was old enough to go, the roadsI traveled became the obsessive subject in my own books. Eventually Isaw that the most passionate travelers have always also been passionatereaders and writers. And that is how this book came about. The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desireto move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstancesof your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experiencean exotic landscape, to risk the unknown, to bear witness to the consequences,tragic or comic, of people possessed by the narcissism of minordifferences. Chekhov said, “If you’re afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.”I would say, if you’re afraid of loneliness, don’t travel. The literature oftravel shows the effects of solitude, sometimes mournful, more often enriching,now and then unexpectedly spiritual. All my traveling life I have been asked the maddening and oversimplifyingquestion “What is your favorite travel book?” How to answer it? Ihave been on the road for almost fifty years and writing about my travelsfor more than forty years. One of the first books my father read to meat bedtime when I was small was Donn Fendler: Lost on a Mountain inMaine. This 1930s as-told-to account described how a twelve-year-oldboy survived eight days on Mount Katahdin. Donn suffered, but he madeit out of the Maine woods. The book taught me lessons in wildernesssurvival, including the basic one: “Always follow a river or a creek in thedirection the water is flowing.” I have read many travel books since, andI have made journeys on every continent except Antarctica, which I haverecounted in eight books and hundreds of essays. I have felt renewedinspiration in the thought of little Donn making it safely down the highmountain. The travel narrative is the oldest in the world, the story the wanderertells to the folk gathered around the fire after his or her return from ajourney. “This is what I saw” — news from the wider world; the odd, thestrange, the shocking, tales of beasts or of other people. “They’re justlike us!” or “They’re not like us at all!” The traveler’s tale is always in thenature of a report. And it is the origin of narrative fiction too, the travelerenlivening a dozing group with invented details, embroidering on experience.It’s how the first novel in English got written. Daniel Defoe basedRobinson Crusoe on the actual experience of the castaway Alexander Selkirk,though he enlarged the story, turning Selkirk’s four and a half yearson a remote Pacific Island into twenty-eight years on a Caribbean island,adding Friday, the cannibals, and tropical exotica.The storyteller’s intention is always to hold the listener with a glitteringeye and riveting tale. I think of the travel writer as idealized in thelines of the ghost of Hamlet’s father at the beginning of the play:  I could a tale unfold whose lightest word  Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,  Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,  Thy knotted and combined locks to part  And each particular hair to stand on end But most are anecdotal, amusing, instructional, farcical, boastful,mock-heroic, occasionally hair-raising, warnings to the curious, or elsethey ring bells like mad and seem familiar. At their best, they are examplesof what is most human in travel. In the course of my wandering life, travel has changed, not only inspeed and efficiency, but because of the altered circumstances of theworld — much of it connected and known. This conceit of Internetinspiredomniscience has produced the arrogant delusion that the physicaleffort of travel is superfluous. Yet there are many parts of the worldthat are little known and worth visiting, and there was a time in my travelingwhen some parts of the earth offered any traveler the Columbus orCrusoe thrill of discovery. As an adult traveling alone in remote and cut-off places, I learned agreat deal about the world and myself: the strangeness, the joy, the liberationand truth of travel, the way loneliness — such a trial at home — isthe condition of a traveler. But in travel, as Philip Larkin says in his poem“The Importance of Elsewhere,” strangeness makes sense. Travel in dreams, for Freud, symbolized death. That the journey — anessay into the unknown — can be risky, even fatal, was a natural conclusionfor Freud to reach, since he suffered from self-diagnosed Reiseangst,travel anxiety. He was so fearful of missing a train that he appeared atrailway stations two hours ahead of time, and when the train appeared atthe platform he usually panicked. He wrote in Introductory Lectures onPsycho-Analysis, “Dying is replaced in dreams by departure, by a trainjourney.” This has not been my experience; I associate my happiest travelingdays with sitting on trains. Some travel is more of a nuisance than ahardship, but travel is always a mental challenge, and even at its mostdifficult, travel can be an enlightenment. The joy of travel, and reading about it, is the theme of this collection —and perhaps the misery too; but even remembered misery can producelyrical nostalgia. As I was rereading some of the books quoted here Irealized how dated they were, and how important as historical documents— the dramas as well as the romance of an earlier time. Yet a lot ofthe old-fangledness of travel ended very recently. This book of insights, a distillation of travelers’ visions and pleasures,observations from my work and others’, is based on many decades ofmy reading travel books and traveling the earth. It is also intended as aguidebook, a how-to, a miscellany, a vade mecum, a reading list, a reminiscence.And because the notion of travel is often a metaphor for livinga life, many travelers, expressing a simple notion of a trip, have writtensomething accidentally philosophical, even metaphysical. In the spirit ofBuddha’s dictum “You cannot travel the path before you have become thepath itself,” I hope that this collection shows, in its approaches to travel,ways of living and thinking too.